Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth

Historians have long recognized that members of the lower branch of the legal profession, the ancestors of the modern solicitors, played an important part in early modern English society, but difficulties in establishing their identities and recovering their career patterns have hitherto left them virtually unstudied. This work charts the massive sixteenth-century increase in central court litigation and offers an explanation of it largely in terms of social change and the decline of local jurisdictions.